Teaching and Learning

For a while now I have been meaning to write about British values and its teaching in schools.

We are human and we have the capacity to do things in good faith or bad. What I am taking aim at here is the bad faith arguments against teaching British values not the genuine concerns that some may have.

mutual respect for and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs and for those without faith

So here are the main arguments I’ve come across against teaching them:

1) British values are just human values

The world is full of counter-examples. Even when other countries have these values, we still need to teach children about how these have developed in our society and the reasons why. By all means compare and contrast but to pretend that there is a uniform journey across all nations or that these values are practised in one way only is not true.

2) It’s racist.

What isn’t these days thanks to the postmodernists and critical race theorists?

Anyone who associates being British purely with being white is the racist here (regardless of political persuasion). They haven’t been paying attention to society at large and they are assuming that those of us with different colour skin who were born here or live here do or should associate with some foreign country elsewhere.

In essence, the far right use this aspect of identity to undermine my birthright and the left do it to reject the nation state.

Either way, I don’t see what right anyone else has to impose on me what priority different aspects of my identity should have.

I can’t be from anywhere else and I couldn’t care less that the majority of people in the country of my birth are white and have been throughout history. Those who claim this is an inherent problem are usually hoping to exploit the division but rarely have a rational reason for the belief they hold.

Why don’t you want non-white people to see themselves as British is a fair question to ask people of all political persuasions.

3) The British don’t live up to these values – look at our history.

If perfection is your poison then sure. No person, group, nation should ever claim to have any values because guaranteed there will have failed at some point or another to live up to them.

This is a nihilistic argument and it pays little attention to the guidance I have come across. I’m happy to be corrected, but nowhere have I seen that you should lie or be dishonest. There is no reason I know of why you can’t look at both when we have lived up to these values and where were haven’t so that we can, together, learn from this.

The process or fact of being received as adequate, valid, or suitable.

Agreement with or belief in an idea or explanation.

I am not religious and I can’t do the above for those that are. The argument is essentially one of validation which stems from a personal insecurity.

Tolerance is the correct term – it’s based on the fact that we are not carbon copies and so at some level we should live and let live as far as possible. We also need to be aware of when we are at the limit of our tolerance and be able to state this to each other. PC culture is reviled by some precisely because it limits our ability to state this in favour of protecting people’s feelings and has become a way of pretending that problems don’t exist when they do.

5) We should be challenging these values.

By all means my anti-British values friends. As long as you are willing to critique the alternative values and those doing the challenging then I have no issue with that at all.

If the purpose is to create or promote a separate set of values which furthers ones own ideological cause (be it political, social, religious) with no examination of the pros and cons of those values then it should be seen for what it is – the kind of bad faith argument that we should reject.

6) The nation state is a problem as is identity at that level.

I can only repeat points made in 5). Does this involve a critique of both nationalism and internationalism? If so, fine; if not, why not?

The middle class left in particular may wish to consider how their own near addiction to radicalism for it’s own sake, utopian internationalism and hatred of the nation state has fed into the extremist thinking present in this country. Critiquing others is easy, thinking critically about ones own beliefs and ideas, less so.

7) It’s a right wing imposition that the left wing should resist.

Only by cherry picking from the history of the British left can one end up at this position. A position that startlingly ignores the role of the left in ensuring that we do live in a truely representative democracy, to give just one example of the contribution made to these British values.

It was a fundamental mistake on the part of the left to hand over British identity to the far right in the past. This requires rectifying not doubling down.

All societies need core values in order to exist peacefully. In Rwanda the lack of this core was identified as having contributed to the genocide and constructing one essential to preventing future conflicts. We are not in such dire straits but we are a society lacking cohesion and the cracks exist. Papering over them with meaningless statements about how we are all the same is not enough. How are we? In what way? Why?

British values provides us with a core that recognisibly stems from the history of the British, they are the best of our values.

Should the core be added to? Should it change? Yes because all societies evolve over time but this doesn’t mean a complete rejection of everything and a requirement to start anew.

What I am rejecting more than anything is utopian/dystopian visions and ideas, which feed off a nihilism based on an inability to cope with human imperfection.

Britain can’t be all things to all people but it can’t be nothing either. Its people can’t be nothing. My parents came here to contribute to Britain not to seek revenge or settle scores – their positive contributions are in danger of being written out by those who seek the use a single period of the history of my ancestors to impose a national self-loathing.

Yet history dwelt upon is not history learnt from.

British values gives us a core, they give us the basis of a conversation, they give us the capacity to examine ourselves and they give us a way forward.

This blog by Stephen Tierney (Headteachers’ Roundtable) proposes an accountability measure based on inclusion to be used alongside performance measures to tackle the “long tail of underachievement”.

It elides all disadvantaged children, looked after children and SEN together under the umbrella of inclusion without explanation.

The author then moves onto the issue of exclusions, without evidencing the extent to which exclusion is the reason for underachievement in these groups.

Certainly, it is an issue for individuals in those groups but to argue it’s an issue for the group as a whole is an extrapolation not evidence.

A supportive school environment is elided with no exclusions and low mobility.

This approach raises a variety of issues and concerns:

1) It misses out the wide variety of reasons why underachievement might occur including individual circumstances, school culture, curriculum, use of ineffective pedagogical practices, lack of teacher training and support, and poor whole school behaviour management systems.

2) Entire groups of children are being casually stereotyped as “challenging pupils” when this is not the case for the vast majority of children who form part of those groups.

3) The lesson of blurring the distinction between the disadvantaged and those with special educational needs should already have been learnt. Implying membership of an ethnic or social group is equivalent to or means to be impaired in some way have been the basis of crude stereotyping of individuals, itself a reason for historic underachievement of some groups in the education system.

4) Exclusion is not the only cause of mobility and no evidence is produced that it’s a major one.

5) There is a tension in this measure which is not addressed. The achievement of disadvantaged groups may be harmed by a focus on less exclusion.

6) It is stated that the exact means of calculating this measure should be confidential. The reason given is to avoid gaming. But secrecy would result in lack of scrutiny, accountability and responsibility on the part of those setting the means of calculating.

No accountability measure is perfect.

But this does not justify the creation of one based on the elision of whole groups of children with a wide variety of needs and assumptions unsupported by evidence using a secret calculation.

As I argued in my last blog, self-expression as the aim of a writing curriculum is a dead-end. To move forward, we need to strip back what has become an over-complicated process.

At its heart writing is communication and thus requires shared understanding of it’s rules and norms to be effective. This should be the goal not a goal.

“Freeing” children of the constraints of spelling, punctuation and grammar is a misguided task. They exist precisely so that we can develop a consistent and shared understanding of what we write, both with ourselves and others. The aim of mastering the written form is not to create one’s own individual form (and misses the point entirely of why writing developed and is a useful tool).

One aspect of emergent writing that I always saw as pointless was the idea that there was some value in writing so long as it could be read and understood by the child. So, presented with the following, one needed to take time listening to what the child had thought they had written:

dooowe dgee geiigo suipqw

The idea was that as the child could “read” it to you it had meaning. Except that it didn’t.

This was simply a child who could form letters but had no sound-letter correspondence at all. More to the point, it didn’t have some special meaning for the child either. Give it half an hour and they would not be able to read it back to convey the same words as they had “read” previously. When I first started teaching there were children who went the whole way through school like this.

Phonics teaching at least has had an impact here, yet a good quality programme needs to be sound to letter and deal with both reading and writing simultaneously as exposure and hope are not sufficient.

Why promote or reinforce the idea that the written form can be reinvented to have meaning at the level of the individual? Ostensibly it was to ensure that fragile self-esteem was not destroyed by correction, ensuring the early writer was not “put off” writing forever.

Yet the concept of raising and protecting self-esteem is pseudoscience. As are corollary ideas such as it impacts on motivation, which affects attainment (Greg Ashman refers to this in the context of maths education here but there is no rational reason to believe it holds true elsewhere either.)

More to the point high self-esteem simply does not compensate for lack of knowledge of how to write. Writing a whole page of barely comprehensible sentences enthusiastically doesn’t lead to it making any more sense.

Clare Sealy’s post about the realistic need for trade-offs including in writing, is refreshingly honest. While teachers, including myself make such trade-offs what I lacked in the past was an understanding of the purpose and the importance of ensuring the overall goal of writing.

If as teachers we don’t understand and respect the need for shared norms in writing, then I don’t see how we can teach writing effectively. It’s a red herring that because some great writers chose to break the rules, that means they never need to be learnt in the first place. Those authors did not do so in ignorance. It’s one thing to read the odd novel where the rules are bent or broken in ones lifetime, it’s another to do so daily in every piece of writing.

I recall one fervent conversation about punctuation in a previous school where I was told that even though a child had not punctuated a single sentence, it was clear they had meant to. Except it wasn’t clear to me and turned the moderation exercise into a spectacular waste of time. No doubt the accountability culture drove some of the self-delusion that the writing was fine after all. But a more productive conversation would have involved working out what we should do to support the child to punctuate accurately. More to the point, children practicing writing incorrectly embeds this and unpicking it later is both time consuming and less effective than teaching it properly in the first place.

The worst culprit here is teacher/adult scribing for the child or underneath the child’s writing what they meant to write, the inverse of what dictation is for. While there are children who have a physical disability, which means they need to be scribed for, they are a rare minority.

That children who have no such need require a scribe is a damning indictment of our writing curriculum and reflects a system which unnecessarily creates mini Barbara Cartlands. Except it’s not laziness, but a lack of knowledge, understanding and practice which creates a dependency culture that hinders the chances of a child becoming writer at all.

Meeting the needs of the mythical early writer who downed his/her pencil forever for being taught explicitly jars with the reality of children who didn’t simply didn’t know how. Neither does basking in the glory in a minority of our best writers change the overall reality for everyone else. Expecting multiple different forms of writing does not induct a child into developing the shared understanding needed to communicate effectively, and turn cohorts into confident, independent writers.

The writing curriculum was and is bloated with genres hoping to inspire children to become better writers, it doesn’t. Instead each new unit is attempting to build on insecure foundations from previous ones that year or previous years, never with enough time to practice or embed the key skills needed. If it did, there would be no need for the kind of hothousing that takes place in Year 6 classes.

Instead a multitude of features and layouts is taking up valuable time on the curriculum, distracting primary teachers from the core teaching of basic skills and making what I consider to the be correct trade-off (in primary at least) – which is genres vs SPaG.

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For a while now I have been meaning to write about British Values and its teaching in schools. We are human and we have the capacity to do things in good faith or bad. What I am taking aim at here is the bad faith arguments against teaching British Values not the genuine concerns that […]